“Music as the art of misleading“, published in: Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, Band 23;

Michael Rebhahn & Thomas Schäfer editors; Schott Music publisher, Mainz, 2016.

Music as the art of misleading

Fabien Lévy

Music is not a “what” but a “how”. Even when the composer invents new techniques, they
must be put at the service of a formal dramaturgy. If not, the piece runs the risk of
functioning merely as a catalogue of effects or as an academic exercise perceptible only to
experts in musical techniques.

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Fig.1 : Ludwig van Beethoven, Sonata n°21 op.53 « Waldstein », 2e mvt

From the first measure in the example above, Beethoven destabilizes the tonality of F
through a harmonic sequence with transitions through an augmented sixth and chromatic
bass. This process of confusion continues in the fifth and sixth measures with a classical
strategy of “surprise of the surprise”1. In only a few measures, Beethoven utilizes
numerous tools of the tonal music of his time, which confound perceptions: shifting from
major to minor, changing tonal functions; augmented sixths; harmonic sequences;
ambiguous harmony/counterpoint through voice leading and particularly through chromatic
shifting; silences on the hard beat; syncopations, etc.

This example could have been replaced with any masterwork of the tonal repertoire:
throughout history, in my opinion, the different tonal techniques have always afforded
equivocal play and shifts in meaning, more than representing univocal functions with
double articulation2 or even grammatical functions, as music theorists would lead one to
believe. Western music theory is indeed unconsciously influenced by logocentrism and
comparisons with the semantic language, while it is more accurate to speak about a
succession and accumulation of tools for ambiguities: analogies minor/major since the
16th century; diminished chords, augmented and Neapolitan sixths by the classics; tonal
ambiguities by Schumann, Brahms or even in Bossa Nova (the harmonization in F and not
in C of the Girl of Ipanema, and more generally the cleverness of the harmonization of the
melodies); or the ambiguities between counterpoint and harmony of Wagner.

1
I examine these « techniques of surprise of the surprise », which are indispensable for the formal progress of the
discourse, in my book Le compositeur, son oreille et ses machines à écrire : déconstruire les grammatologies du
musical pour mieux les composer, Paris, France, Vrin, 2014, p.210.
2
In the sense of André Martinet (Eléments de linguistique générale). In art, the « content plane » and the « expression
plane » (cf. Hjemslev) are irreducible (except for concept art): a discourse can be paraphrased, but not a poem, where
form and content are consubstantial.

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This search for musical amphibologies by composers is also present in many other
cultures: consider, for instance, the position of Sam or the Kaida rules in the Hindustani
music. Indeed, this principle can be found in any type of music that requires a cognitive
apperception3. Unlike to semantic languages, music primarily finds its sense, or more
generally its expression, through double- and countersense. As we already noted, these
resources first deserve emergence4 and formal expressivity.

In my opinion, this property of equivocality entails a few aesthetic consequences:

* The consideration of cognitive apperception in music seems to have been eclipsed by

too many composers of “contemporary music”. It remains a central topic in my work.
Without consideration of cognitivity arises for me the risk of gestural effects without any
possibility of compression/comprehension5 for the listener, and particularly without any
possibility of anticipation and cognitive surprise. However, it is important to understand
this notion as a means to create cultural “ambiguity” and not as an effort to give
“meaning” to music.

* Considering cognitivity doesn’t mean regressing to tried and tested techniques that
afforded ambiguity in the past, such as the classified functions of tonal music. Indeed,
sensitive equivocality happens at boundaries between a known and a formerly unknown
(or rather unheard of) understanding by shifting them. We should remember that the
Tristan chord, for instance, is now an accepted cultural construction without any natural
justification. In other words, consonance is the learning of a dissonance that could make
sense.

* The composer’s preoccupation with apperceptive ambiguities implies a narrow path,

aesthetically and sociologically, since he/she is taking both the risk of experimentation
with the risk that he/she wants it to be perceived. Therefore, he/she will satisfy neither
those who desire to listen and fetishize that which created ambiguities in the past, nor
those who, as an excess of distinction6, even perhaps snobbism, or as an ethics of
tolerance and progress, remain hostile to any perceptive scheme which could be
partially understood, even if this means for them favoring chaos, the perceptibly
incompressible as a more or less unconscious ideal. Some denounce this attitude with
the term “negative aesthetic”, an attitude from which some composers take advantage
as a posture, or even as an imposture…

These principles of cognitive ambivalence and perceptive risks have accompanied my

work for a long time.

Still as a music student, I have developed techniques of trans-parametric inflection, where

one change affects different musical parameters in analogous relations. The listener

3
Leibniz used the concept of apperception instead of perception as a disagreement with the mechanist explanation for
perception by Descartes (Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz, Monadologie, 1714, § 17). For Leibniz, apperception emerges
from the representation of an object via the cogito through the presence of the subject. Kant then characterised the
different apperceptions according to their proximity to the sensitive, in differentiating them from the conscious mind
(Immanuel Kant, Critique of pure reason, transcendental analytic, 1787, § 16)
4
As defined by John Stuart Mill or George Henry Lewes: a result by emergence is not reducible to the sum of the
properties of its components. See also Edgar Morin
5
“Cognitive Compression” in the sense of Information Theory and of Kolmogorov-Chaitin Complexity Theory (Cf.
Lévy, op.cit., chapter on complexity, p.129).
6
In the sense of Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction, critique sociale du jugement, Paris, Minuit, 1979. See also : Harvey
Leibenstein : “Bandwagon, Snob and Veblen Effects in the Theory of Consumer Demand“, Quarterly Journal of
Economics, vol. 64.-2, 1950, p.183-207.

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perceives something but is unable to detect which parameter is affected. Also, my works
typically like to thwart different musical categories: a quartet is not written for four voices,
but for many virtual voices which pass from one instrument to another. The listener cannot
be sure whether certain surfaces are simply textures or if it is necessary to discern certain
lines or other salient elements. In Hérédo-Ribotes (2001) for solo viola and 51 orchestra
musicians, the viola is sometimes a soloist, sometimes an acoustic component of a timbre
which blends that of its colleagues, and sometimes part of a whole comprising “small
elementary virtual instruments” which dislocate and spread from the soloist to other
musicians while changing size and identity. In Soliloque sur [x, x, x], commentaire par un
ordinateur d’un concert mal compris de lui (2002) (Soliloquy about [x, x, x], commentaries
of a computer on a misunderstood concert), the computer recreates a piece by using
samples of the programmed musical pieces of the evening. Do we deal with a work, a
meta-work or a simple commentary? In Als Gregor & Griselda (2015), a perfect “Vuza”
vocal canon, polyphony vanishes and each voice becomes a mere element of a monody
by contributing syllable-notes which, taken together bit by bit, reveal the erotic meaning of
the vocals to the audience.

In the music of the Pygmies, one of the artistic devices of exchange and ambiguity
consists of passing the rhythmic cells from one voice to the other. The sum of the voices
remains the same while the listener gets lost between the different exchanges (fig. 2).

Fig. 2: technique of “cross-rhythm”

Since 2003, I have combined different techniques of cognitive ambivalence by using

generalized cross-rhythms (an imperfect term to describe what I am aiming at).
Generalized cross-rhythms (fig. 3) extend the Pygmy’s technique to other parameters
(rhythmic motive, instrumentation, morphology, profile of pitch within a given harmonic
field, space). These parameters are exchanged between the different voices, but take
different directions so that the listener perceives an overall regularity as well as isotopies,
yet remains unable to follow the voices or to perceive any exact repetition.

Fig. 3: technique of “generalized cross-rhythm”, formal scheme.

Three parameters are especially promising for cognitive musical amphibologies:

a. Space (à tue-tête, for nine spatialized instruments (2014); Hérédo-Ribotes, for solo
viola and 51 orchestra musicians (2001); Soliloque sur [x, x, x] (2002 ; Les
sonneries de Cantenac (2008) ), because spatialisation allows for the exchange of
virtual instruments in space, the decentering and the loss of geographical markers;

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 b. Timbre, by creating with advanced playing and orchestration techniques changing
hybrid sounds beyond notes;
c. Rhythm.

Indeed, rhythm is a highly cognitive parameter. It is first important to assert that rhythm is
in no way reducible to the alphabet of the same name. This is a typical misconception of a
Western culture focused on writing and separating the musical phenomena into
independent parameters and ascribing distinct alphabets to them. For instance, the rhythm
of the augures printaniers in the Rite of the Spring is not a sequence of quarter notes, but
rather a cognitive grid of an irregular sequence of orchestrated accents (i.e. changes of
timbre and dynamics) inside a regular pulsation. Another example, a superimposition of
quintuplets inside triplets, themselves inside sextuplets, as can be seen in some works of
the “complexity school”, is not in my opinion a rhythm, but a gesture (fully justified by an
intent of tension, but it is another question). These rhythms are cognitively incompressible,
in the Kolmogorov-Chaitin sense, and therefore induce no possible rhythmical
apperception.

To me, rhythm is primarily a mental construction of an arborescent partitioning of time

where only a few signals are played in order to let some unuttered cognitive structures
emerge (in playing on different stratum of pulsation –minimal, nominal, metrics–, on
syncopations, metrical shifting changes of minimal pulse, etc.). Rhythm is fully
apperceptive. Rhythm is an idea of the implicit and explicit inside a cognitive grid of
striated time with multiple dimensions. It is for instance the role of the meter in the Western
music (fig.4), which is only indirectly heard, even if explicitly written.

Fig.4: Rhythm as a mental construction rather than as a written sign: the metric
problematic.

Rhythm is therefore an ideal parameter to thwart cognitive expectations, wether by

installing and then challenging minimal, nominal or metrical pulses, by playing with
different polymeters and polyrhythms, or by creating syncopations.

I am sometimes amazed at how the brilliant generation of composers born around 1925,
(those who were in their 20’s at the end of WWII, the actors of the tabula rasa), were
deeply immersed in the Structuralism, and therefore largely reluctant towards any concept
of ambivalence. On the contrary, they fantasized that music could function like science or
semantic languages, with clear, univocal and explicit musical rules. Of course, there were
some exceptions, like Ligeti who praised the importance of the game in music. Also, this
generation came before the postmodern revolution, and more exactly the deconstruction
movement, which questioned representations and particularly the logocentrism of the
Western thought. Their Zeitgeist was definitively not interested in double-meaning.

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In contrast, the young generation, younger than me, born after the 80’s, seems mostly
interested in obtaining unexpected sounds, in the inheritance of Lachenmann, Sciarrino, or
the spectral composers (but without their formalism). They often use instruments for what
they are not made for, and technology. The game is everywhere, but mostly timbral ( see
the wonderful works by Mark André, Francesco Filidei, Franck Bedrossian, Clara Iannotta,
Alex Mincek or Mauro Lanza), or in its commentary of the music (Johannes Kreidler,
Carola Bauckholt, Simon Steen-Andersen), and mostly intuitive. They thwart our ear and
are far from the intellectual speculations of their forefathers.

Maybe because I belong to an intermediary generation, perhaps because I studied and

taught mathematics and was quite mediocre in natural sciences which seemed to me not
abstract enough, possibly because I studied with Grisey who was, in contrary to his
spectral colleagues, less interested in timbre and more in the arrow of time and in
sequence of surprises and expectations, also maybe because I believe more in culture
than in nature –we listen to with our brain and not with our ears-, in my works, I am more
interested in cognitive games which are more inductive than analogical, more cultural than
only the timbral, even if I admire the extreme inventiveness in that domain of many of my
younger colleagues.

More generally, a thought of paradox and of deconstruction offers efficient and inspiring
methods for my compositions. It points out the limits of our cognitive representations, and
shift them, if possible. In contrast to other arts, which have a longer autonomous history,
Western art music has been mainly formatted by two short centuries, those of the great
absolute music (before and after that period, music was mostly in service of other genres:
dance, theater, church service, video, drinking a beer). The genres that appeared during
this period configured most of the current organizations of Western art music: orchestras,
conservatories, instruments (who writes for viola da gamba today?), operas, musicology,
but also our musical representations (a narrow concept of work, of timbre, of instrument, of
concert, of concert hall, of virtuosity, of complexity, and of musical intelligence). Therefore,
the goal of deconstruction is not only to go beyond the signs and logocentrism, and to find
new grammatologies in trying new graphemologies. It is also to rethink culturally formatted
representations and finally, to offer new misleading ways for music beyond signs7 and
logocentrism.

7 “The constitution of a science or a philosophy of writing is a necessary and difficult task. But a thought of the trace,
of differance or of reserve, having arrive at these limits, and repeating them ceaselessly, must also point beyond the
field of the epistemè“, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1967,
transl. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 1997, p.93.